Rhea

Well, maybe it all just boils down to that. As odd as that "feels" it seems to be what you are all trying to tell me. That there is no real reason to be accurate with the name. ~shrug~ Feels weird. I felt like there had to be something I was "missing". But it's just something that would be important to me and isn't to others.


it just still feels very weird to not use the real people's names as they would have called themselves, assuming they were real people. And it just makes it harder for me to assume they were real people, I guess. But there I have it.


Thanks for the answers.

Hazel-rah

Just a stray thought...

I wonder if there's ethnocentrism involved? You know, the whole "Jesus was white and spoke English" thing a lot of Christian sects have going on?

Not necessarily all the way to anti-Semitism, just something to make the names feel a little closer to home--as you suggested, make the people seem more real, more like someone you might find in your hometown.

Silent Acorns

Rhea,

I agree with you that the "Jesus" instead of "Ye'shua" thing is kind of strange. Why translate it half-way and then stop there?

It would be interesting to hang out at a Christian forum and insist on calling Jesus Christ by his Proper English Name: "Joe the Annointed" just to see how they respond.

Doctor X

Tradition! TRAAAAADITION!!!

"We" have been use to the Angelicized/Latinized names for so long it causes confusion. For instance "Moshe" is, if I have it correct, the more original to "Moses," and "Shlomo" to "Solomon."

"King Shlomo!"

Somehow does not have a great ring to it.

--J.D.

Sarpedon

Yeah, the christian messiah can't be called by a Jewish name after all. Thats all there is to it. Jesus is the latinization of Yeshua. They probably went with the latin jesus and the greek joshua to give their savior a unique name, so you wouldn't have the equivalent of "I am the Lord Bob, Your God!" Hazel is quite correct.

Peking also was correct, because Jing means capital and King means city. Beijing was only the capital of china during the Manchu dynasty and the People's Republic. During the Republic of China, the capital was at Nanking (which appears on contemporary maps as "Nanjing") The capital of china for most of its history was Louyang (now called Hofei)

The Evil One

Actually, in earlier times, it probably would.

Before the world became as literate as it is today, a person's name could have several forms in different languages, and the form used to refer to them would depend on what language you were speaking.

So, for instance, Charlemagne is still known as Karl der Grosse in German. And Christipher Columbus, as has been pointed out, is another example of the same thing.

Even within a language you can have many variant forms of a single name. So for instance, Helen and Elaine are the same name, but they have passed through different languages on their way from Greek to English. Just as "Joshua"/"Yeshua" is a direct transplant from Hebrew to English, whereas "Jesus" is the same name passed through a Greek or Latin filter on the way from Hebrew to English.

Jayjay

How do we know how the names were pronounced at the time? And even if we did, the modern english alphabet wouldn't necessarily be able to convey that pronounciation in sufficient detail, we'd have to use phonetic letters, accompanied by the original hebrew/aramaic/greek.

Doctor X

In fact, I have read we have lost the pronounciation of "YHWH."

--J.D.

The Evil One

Historical linguistics can tell us pretty much how most names were pronounced back then, with some small grey areas. EG we know for certain that Latin "v" is a "w" and Latin "j/i" is a "y" and that Latin "c" is always "k" never "s" (ie Julius Caesar == Yoolyus K-eye-saar). Phonetic letters can capture it pretty precisely, and for most old languages there are conventions of English transcription where you just need to know the rules for pronouncing the words and you can muddle through quite well with just the English alphabet.

YHWH is an exception because when the Jews started puttign vowel marks on the OT, they put the vowel marks for "adonai" on "yhwh" because they always said "adonai" as a euphemism for "yhwh". This is where Jehovah comes from (yahowaih). So the original vowels are lost. "Yahweh" is a best-guess reconstruction.

Clutch

There's no point complaining that natural language does not have principled rules about this sort of thing. Context and history play an important role in deciding whether names are imported or naturalized into another language.

I find the continued use of "Peking" to be reactionary, yet I would find the pronunciation [Paree] for "Paris" incredibly pretentious among English speakers. But I don't think these two attitudes are somehow contradictory; the contexts are very different. To suppose that questions of language pragmatics should be governed by a single rule is extremely naive.